Computer application workflow systems define a sequence of business procedures involving multiple workers and for managing an actual flow of a business process. Workflow systems computerize or electronically perform management of a business according to the business procedures. The introduction of a workflow system into a business can enhance efficiency. From the viewpoint of improving paperwork efficiency in an office, lowering the cost of space for file cabinets, environmental issues, and so on, it is beneficial to construct a paperless form processing system in which, for example, a shipping process, is electronically performed. However, the actual shipping process is complicated, and because of the need to handle exceptions, a paperless form processing system has not become widely used or accepted.
To offer a solution to this problem, FORMWAVE (trademark of International Business Machines Corp.) is now commercially available from IBM as an electronic application system capable of easily designing and managing a complicated workflow process. FORMWAVE uses a workflow engine to establish and manage a complicated route in a series of activities from fill-in of a form to approval and data storage of the form in each of various applications and business approval processes. This enables quick and accurate processing, thereby improving productivity in each division or organization.
For example, prior art of such a workflow system, Japanese unexamined patent publication No. 10-105623, discloses a technique for dividing and registering workflow definition information in order to commonly use the divided registration information among multiple workflows. This technique can provide an efficient, fine-grained management of workflow processes by changing, terminating, and restarting some of the processes. Japanese unexamined patent publication No. 10-134127 also teaches a technique for giving advance notice to a worker working on currently circulated matter and workers scheduled to take over the circulated matter at the time of collection of the stagnated circulation to prevent each worker from getting confused in the course of their work. Further, Japanese unexamined patent publication No. 2000-137763 discloses a technique for monitoring elapsed time from the moment that an electronic document is sent to a node so that execution of business activities will not be delayed even when a user or participant currently in charge of work is forced by uncontrollable circumstances to temporarily terminate his or her work. In this technique, if an allocated processing time has elapsed without completion of the work, the electronic document concerned will be automatically skipped.
In current workflow systems, if a participant is also their own boss, the participant will need to work on the same form several times to give approval in the correct succession. For example, suppose that in a department to which a form originator A belongs, a person B serves as both the subsection chief and the section chief and a person C serves as the department manager. In this case, the person B serving as both the subsection chief and the section chief has to give approval to the same form twice in succession despite no change to the form. Generally, once a person makes a determination on a form, the person is not likely to change that determination at the respective nodes. In other words, if the person makes the same determination, the work should only need to be done once. However, existing workflow systems require repetition of the same work multiple times for respective nodes.
Further, Suppose that the nodes to be processed by one participant are in consecutive order. In this case, if work on the first node can be adopted for the following nodes, that is, if work on the first node is also applicable to the following nodes (when work defined to be treated the same as the work on the first node is applied even if the same work is not applicable), it can be presumed that the work on the first node will be performed on the following nodes. Such a processing method has already been proposed. In the proposed method, however, the participant can only reference the information provided at the first node. The participant's entries of information are also restricted to the information capable of being input into the first node. Therefore, if fields to which reference or changes are allowed vary from post to post, for example, if access permission to information is different between respective nodes, such as a case where the authorization to personnel information is different between the subsection chief and the section chief, the participant may not be able to reference information necessary for decision making. In such a case, the participant also cannot change or enter necessary information, and this may cause an error at an intermediate node.
The present invention herein solves the above-mentioned technical problems, and it is an object thereof to complete work on consecutive nodes to be processed by one participant at a time instead of repeating the same work multiple times as required in the conventional systems.